Ridin’ the Rails:
The Place of the Passenger and the Space of the Hobo

“The body” is an idea that has
been at the center of debate in cultural studies where lines are
drawn and redrawn over issues including race, gender, science,
and technology. As the body has been theorized, however, it has
also been torn and tattooed. Pulled away from the substance of
blood and tissue, it has lost some of its physical authority.
Bodies, however, are not mere theoretical ideas, ethereal and
unsubstantial. They are physical entities existing in time, place,
space even if they choose to manipulate their own invisibility,
an act frequent among marginal peoples. Remaining faithful to
the physicality of the body in this study, I want to contrast
the body of the rail passenger against the “invisible”
body within the rail hobo subculture. By inserting their bodies
within designated areas of the actual machine of the railroad
car, I will argue, hobos achieve a spatiality of subcultural power.1.

The Place
of the Passenger

The railroad line represents an invasion of place over space.
Michel de Certeau, in a chapter entitled “Railway Navigation
and Incarceration” from his influential book The Practice
of Everyday Life, shows that inside the railroad car is a
place of order where everything is in its right and proper place.
It is “traveling incarceration” where the “unchanging
traveler is pigeonholed, numbered and regulated in the grid of
the railway car” (111). As passengers hand their tickets
to the conductor, their movements are managed in this closed environment;
they have been assigned a place to sit, to order lunch, to smoke
a cigarette, and to relieve themselves: the price of a ticket
allows them to perform certain bodily functions in logically organized
and designated places. For the most part, though, they sit, immobile,
and look out the glass pane at other immobile objects—cows
staring dumbly in fields, mountain peaks covered in snow, streetlamps
illuminating the night sky. As the window frames the “picture”
that the passengers see, the objects, like them, become still,
silent, fixed.

Like people who go to the cinema and stare at a screen, the passengers
become voyeurs as they sit in their seats while the “action”
outside the train is “caught” in what could be described
as a frame in a film. It is not, however, the physical movement
of the passengers that change the frames, rather, “vision
alone continually undoes and remakes the relationships between
these fixed elements” (112). These changes in their vision
and the amount of scenery outside of their windows that they see
and can process is therefore dependent on the machine’s
speed; the faster the train moves, the more their vision and the
frame become blurred. Inside this module of “panoptic and
classifying power,” they are rational cells traveling within
a rational cell (111). They are passing recognizable places (depending,
of course, on the speed of the train)—places that have been
scouted, mapped and, after much consideration, time and money,
deemed most appropriate for the building of that particular track.

These decisions of placement are “strategies”
designed by the railroad organizers only after much planning and
negotiating to decide what space should come under their control.
2.Strategies, as de Certeau explains,
are intimately aligned with the issue of place since they are

the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that
become possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business,
an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It
postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve
those as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed
of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the
country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research,
etc.) can be managed. (35-36)

Strategies, therefore, are formed from bases of power and are
used to manage and control objects; they are a mastery of “places
through sight” (36). By dividing and bordering space, those
“agents of order” strategize and therefore may be
able to identify and manipulate any object within their scope
of vision. And depending on the situation, the “targets”
do not even know (or care) that they are being managed or controlled.
This is the case with a person sitting in a seat on a train. The
passengers, by paying for a ticket, have entered into a contract
and agree to be managed by the railroad companies who have both
the “will and power” to own the land that those tracks
cover. They rely on the operators to take them on their journey
and while they may not even know how they are getting there, they
believe in their binding contract (the ticket) that, for example,
the New York to Chicago express will somehow get them to Chicago
in time for their meeting. When these lines of iron are placed
into the ground, they define, categorize, and regulate the environment—something
to which the passengers are mostly oblivious when they sit in
the seat that has been assigned to them.

This idea of order and regulation provides a useful explication
of place. As de Certeau states, “A place is thus an instantaneous
configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability”
(117). There is much pleasure that can be derived from being in
a stable environment even if that pleasure is based on the need
to follow the “proper rules.” The pleasure lies in
the fact that passengers are in the place of the railroad car
and that the “instantaneous configurations of positions”
allow them to be cared for by the railroad companies. While their
“position” is that of a dependant, the strict order
leaves them, for the most part, free from worry. Sitting in their
proper position, their spots are defined and stable; their role,
for example, might be that of passenger number 42 on a Washington,
D.C. to Pittsburg “red-eye” express and that role
is strictly monitored by conductors and fellow passengers. All
they need to do is to sit, relax, and allow themselves to be transported
from one place to another.

The Space
of the Hobo

While the passenger occupies a place on the train, the hobo inhabits
the realm of space. All actions of the passengers are regulated;
if they break their contract—for example, if they light
a cigarette in a no-smoking section—then they can be removed
and suffer the legal penalties. As passengers, we rely on this
order, so we play the passive role. When there is a break or rupture
in the order of this “social contract,” we realize
how much we depend on others to follow their prescribed roles.
Traveling through neighborhoods that we might feel afraid to walk
through, we feel a sense of safety because we are confined and
comfortably situated within the train. We are no longer active,
worrying about our safety but passive, feeling sure that the order
will prevail. Whether it is the fast speed at which we travel
through the areas we fear or the feeling of invincibility riding
in such a large and powerful machine, there is a cushion that
comforts us within a train. As a result, when that order is disrupted,
the anxiety and betrayal we feel is great.

Let me give an example: While I was traveling on a train in Portugal
from a beach town to downtown Lisbon, a group of twenty or so
men in their early twenties boarded the train at a suburban stop.
As the train passed by a certain spot, on cue, they began attacking
the passengers, stealing jewelry and watches, and terrorizing
certain ethnic groups, all in the time it took to arrive at the
next stop when, all at once, they ran out of the car. When the
train began moving again, no one knew what to do; we were all
in a state of shock and for the most part, we sat silently in
our seats and stared straight in front of us. We did nothing but
remain immobile waiting for the train to rumble to our own particular
destinations. Personally, I was having trouble comprehending the
moments of chaos that happened within the car. Unable to rationalize
the level of violence in a place of such order, I sat in my seat
and waited to be carried to my station. Not once during the trip
did I become other than a passive passenger. As we were leaving
the car, I heard one woman ask, “Where were the conductors?”
We had followed our roles as passengers, and we wondered where
the agents of order on whom we all relied had gone when the rational
gave way to the chaotic.

What those twenty or so youths did in the time in-between platforms
was to create a space for themselves within the realm of place.
Space exists when there is a rupture in the stability of the environment,
when subjects enter into a “proper” place and use
it for their own purposes—purposes not sanctioned by those
who “own” the place. Be it political soap-boxers proclaiming
their manifestos on a street corner in Manhattan, thieves grabbing
chains on a train in Portugal, or hobos stealing rides on a train
headed to Kansas City, all assert their own subcultural power
within a regulated place and—for a time at least—transform
it into their own space.

This creation of space results in instability—a tear—in
the order of things. It is a “practiced place” (de
Certeau 117) where subjects use opportunities that are presented
to them in order to carve a space in which to assert their own
power. It is, however, the power of the weak. Unable to use strategies,
they are left in the margins, poaching off the larger powers and
taking advantage of the opportunities that are presented to them;
they must always live in the present, using tactics to play with
the law that is oppressing them (37). These twenty or so youths,
while powerful in the short time that it took to travel in-between
stations, did not have the power of the “proper,”
and if they had spent too long in one place, they eventually would
have been stopped and arrested for their actions. Strategies belong
to the strong (I later heard that the police were “strategizing”
on how better to protect passengers from these guerilla-style
attacks), and the youths, therefore, had to use tactics which
fragmentarily forced themselves into the other’s place (xix).
By using surprise, therefore, they were able to create chaos for
a time and leave before order was restored. This is the power
that subcultures use to create space in ordered, and therefore
hostile, environments.

The hobos who have traveled and travel across the country looking
for work from the late nineteenth century to the present day constitute
a subculture that, much like Dick Hebdige’s punks, is “alternatively
dismissed, denounced and canonized” (2). The hobo is a member
of an economically mobile and socially unstable subculture that
has carved a space within the culture’s recognized and accepted
places. The hobo—who is defined by the fact that he rides
illegally on trains—is forever on the fringes of place.
Never inside the train’s regimented system, he is always
on the outside. But he is also defined by that of which he is
not a part; although never counted by the authorities, hobos are
dependent on the trains for their movement and could not exist
without them. There is an intimate link between the machine itself
and the hobo—a bond that is essential and unique to the
hobo and his lifestyle.

While de Certeau explains that both the passenger and the objects
outside the window were immobile and fixed objects, he makes the
important observation that it is the railroad itself that is making
noise:

There is a beating of the rails, a vibrato of the windowpanes—a
sort of rubbing together of spaces at the vanishing points
of their frontier. These junctions have no place. They
indicate themselves by passing cries and momentary noises. These
frontiers are illegible; they can only be heard as a single
stream of sounds, so continuous is the tearing off that annihilates
the points through which it passes. (113, italics mine)

It is the Iron Horse that cuts
through the places—the towns, the valleys, the deserts—and
at the “vanishing point of the frontier,” the places
disappear at the point of contact. These places are illegible,
annihilated and can only be heard and no longer seen. While the
railroad’s speed and ubiquity has brought places in the
country closer together (it has cut the time that it takes to
get, for example, from Boston to Washington), spaces are still
brought into being through the very act of the machine rumbling
and screaming across the continent. The passenger, however, is
unaware—and distant—as he sits in his seat, cushioned
and protected within the place of the railroad car. The only sound
that he hears is the vibrating of the window; he could put his
hand on the pane and feel the rhythm or hear the click-clack,
click-clack of the train on the tracks. In these places, there
are only sounds. In space, however, there is noise. 3.Unlike the passive relationship between the passenger
and the train, the hobo, who is physically present where the spaces
rub together, is connected in a more corporal way.

Hobos, sitting in the corners of the open boxcar, are physically
a part of that borderland where the frontier disappears. They
are, therefore, in that space where there is no sound but only
noise. Hebdidge writes that “subcultures represent ‘noise’
(as opposed to sound), interference in the orderly sequence,”
and while passengers are culturally permitted to raise their voices
a bit when ordering pretzels in the bar-car, hobos, trying to
keep warm in sub-zero temperatures as the train races through
the countryside, may yell, stamp their feet, and run around in
the boxcar in order to keep alive (90). For example, Jim Tully,
in his hobo memoir, Beggars of Life, writes of a hazardous
trip that almost cost him his life: “The cold air numbed
my muscles until a stupor fought to gain control of my brain .
. . I pounded the roof of the car to revive the ebbing circulation
of my blood. I shook my head violently, as a pugilist does to
drive the effect of a grueling smash from his brain” (230).
Unable to stop the train, Tully had to endure as much as he could.
Since he was not in the place of the railroad car, however, he
was able to take actions not permitted (or warranted) to passengers.
Since the hobos cannot be heard above the roar of the engine or
seen in the darkness of the night, they can use their voices to
yell and hoot; they can laugh or curse; they can stomp around
to stay warm or simply because they’re bored.

By stealing
a ride, hobos are outside of history; there is no seat assigned,
no money exchanged for a ticket, no knowledge that they are even
there on the train and, therefore, they do not officially exist.
And while the railroad engineers may suspect that the hobos are
there, they do not count. When people exist in the spaces of society
(and as a homeless wanderer participating in an illegal activity,
the hobo fits this category), those who are connected to places
will not recognize them. 4.When de Certeau, when examining the incarceration of a passenger
in a railway car, correctly wrote that “history exists where
there is a price to be paid” (113), he was probably aware
that there are those who are outside of history and who cannot
afford or do not wish to pay the price to “ride the cushions,”
yet still take the train. Official history exists only in areas
that can be seen; spaces of darkness need to be illuminated and
forced into the accepted hegemonic discourse of the time by the
culture’s regulators, for space is dangerous to the established
order precisely because the actions taking place there are unseen
and therefore cannot be regulated. As Michel Foucault showed when
using the theory of the panopticon, there is much advantage in
keeping people under the (illusory) constant gaze of the state
rather than plunging subcultures in the dark where they can gather
strength in secrecy. For in established places, people can be
seen and therefore there is “a power through transparency,
subjection through illumination” (Foucault 162). But what
Jeremy Bentham did not realize when he revolutionized surveillance
and the prison system, which Foucault is quick to point out, is
that some subjects would resist this gaze and would seek to create
spaces not monitored by cultural forces. Not everyone is passive,
and “there would always be ways of slipping through their
net” (162). 5.The
hobo is not a passive figure and resists the gaze by stepping
outside of history. While the passengers are always under the
gaze of established authority as they sit within the place of
the railroad car, the hobo exists in the space of noise and movement
as the train cuts through the recognized places of the country.
And while the distance between points has been diminished by the
speed of the locomotive, there is still the moment of contact,
the “rubbing of spaces” created by the train’s
movement that is unobservable and outside of history. As the hobos
hold on to the train for dear life at that moment of contact in
this realm of chaotic “noise,” they become part of
the Iron Horse. Unlike the everyday passenger who is cushioned
and protected, the hobo is actually intimately intertwined with
the machine. And, if de Certeau is correct and the machine is
a producer of space, then so too are the hobos when, as my figures
show, they becomes part of the inner workings of the train.

While the “machine is the premium mobile, the solitary god
from which all action proceeds,” de Certeau could also be
describing the hobos themselves as they becomes part of the machine
that cuts through the landscape (113). One of the most dangerous
ways of stealing a ride between stops and thus the one that hobo
autobiographies brag about the most was “riding the rods.”
Kenneth Allsop, who wrote Hard Travelin’: A Hobo and
His History,described this perilous way of traveling:

Beneath the old boxcar—not on today’s streamlined
models—the iron frame was underbraced by gunnels, or iron
bars, running lengthwise eighteen inches below the belly of the
car, leaving a space into which a reasonably slim hobo (and they
were seldom fat) could sidle and so be borne, stretched flat on
his back like a kipper on a grill, cradled between the thundering
wheels and a few inches above the sleepers and spraying cinders.
(159)

The hobos would find a piece of wood or board and make an improvised
seat a few inches above the gravel. If the hobos fell asleep,
or if they slipped, or if an angry engineer with a grudge threw
a bolt under the car where it then became a lethal weapon to knock
the hobos off their perches, certain death would follow. This
position was extremely dangerous because the distance between
the hobo and the machine was non-existent—arms and legs
intertwined with bolts and steel. Drawings and photos corroborate
this amalgamation. For example, the popular photo by A. J. Carrel
Lucas clearly shows this intermingling of steel and flesh: the
hobos are laying flat on their stomachs with the wind blowing
fiercely in their faces (although somehow one of the ‘bos
has his hat on!) (see figure 1). They are only inches away from
the wheels of the train; their bodies become engulfed by the machine
itself. The hobo closest to the viewer’s eye has his head
strongly stuck out into the wind, his arm forming a sideways “L”
with his palm flat on the steel and his elbow almost connected
to the wheel. With his look of determination and forcefulness,
he seems as if he is propelling the train forward; he is not being
carried by the train, rather, he is moving with the train, urging
it onward. While this is certainly a romantic reading, I would
argue that numerous photos of hobos riding the rods substantiate
my claim. As the photo from Jack London’s hobo autobiography
The Road clearly shows, there is no protection from the elements
and the hobo’s arm is literally a couple of inches from
the rails (see figure 2). Any movement—either by him or
the train—that separated him from the machine would mean
certain death. Thus, as the machine enters the “disappearing
frontier,” so too enters the hobo.

Figure 1

Figure 2

While “riding the rods”
was the most dangerous thing hobos could do, any place on the
train could be transformed into space by the hobo. It would take
pages to account for all of the places that have been transformed
into spaces by hobos. 6.A while they might have been arrested or suffer physical hardships
if they were caught or if they slipped from their spaces, their
intimate, physical connection to the train—the lack of distance
between the flesh and the steel—showed that the ordered
environment of the railroad car could be penetrated by those with
the desire (and skill) to do so.

It is this ability to use their bodies
to create space that locates the hobos’ source of subcultural
freedom and power within the dominant culture’s regimented
order. While de Certeau’s major thesis in The Practice
of Everyday Life is that average, everyday people offer resistance
within the constricting environments of society, the hobo, by
intermingling with the train itself, goes one step further: By
creating a space outside the gaze of authority and coupling himself
with the machine that is creating space at the moment of contact
in-between places, the hobo exists in a realm within which the
everyday passenger, in the ordered environment of the railroad
car, can never be included. The hobo’s power, therefore,
exists when the train is in motion and breaking through the frontiers—when
he is intimately connected to a force of such magnitude and strength.
7.

It is when hobos are physically and intimately connected to the
train by their illegal riding that they have the most freedom
and—even though death or maiming is just a slip away—control.
The train is thousands of pounds strong and traveling at fast
speeds; the hobo, if seen at all, is a blur. Unlike passenger
number 42 commuting from Washington, D.C. to Pittsburg on “red-eye”
express, the hobos, unseen and therefore outside history, have
a certain control because they are invisible and part of the “noise”
of the machine. Only when the whistle sounds and the engine dies
in the terminal does the power of the hobo and the train disappear:
“In the mobile world of the train station, the immobile
machine suddenly seems monumental and almost incongruous in its
mute, idol-like inertia, a sort of god-undone” (de Certeau
114). Back in a place that is regimented, ordered, and under surveillance,
the hobo has to worry about being seen and, more importantly,
about the consequences of being caught without a ticket in the
train yard. With the metal god no longer spitting smoke and sparks,
the hobos must untangle themselves from the machines and slink
along the tracks until they can find a safe haven in the hidden
jungles on the outskirts of town. The space that they create,
therefore, is temporary and must be replicated every time they
want to catch another ride.

The body, and the ability to control its visibility, is at the
heart of the hobo’s subcultural power. An analysis of Charles
Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), a fictionalized,
historical work about the Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot
of 1898, might be useful to explore this unique power of the hobo
as compared to a “normal” passenger who is subservient
to rules and regulations of a particular society. One of the main
characters, Dr. Miller, an educated man who had received favorable
press and prestige in the Northeast and in Europe for his surgical
operations, is returning to Wilmington to open up a hospital when
he meets his former white mentor, the renowned Dr. Burns. A few
hours into the trip, however, the conductor informs both parties
that they would have to separate and that Miller would have to
move into the “colored” car—for in the ordered
environment of the railroad system, only some members of certain
races can sit in particular cars. When the two object, the conductor
warns, “I could simply switch this car off the next siding,
transfer the white passengers to another, and leave you and your
friend in possession until you were arrested and fined or imprisoned”
(55). The law of surveillance and order cannot be bucked and Miller
submits to the rules and regulations of the railroad company (which
are the rules and regulations of the larger State of Virginia);
thus he moves to the car that is designated for him.

After being thrown out of the “Whites Only” railroad
car and forced into the colored section, Miller looks out the
window, and, with both shock and sadness, he spots Josh Green,
a large African American man who had snuck aboard and hidden himself
on the train.

As the train came to a standstill, a huge negro, covered thickly
with dust, crawled off one of the rear trucks unobserved, and
ran round the rear end of the car to a watering-trough by a neighboring
well . . . He threw himself down by the trough, drank long and
deep, and plunging his head into the water, shook himself like
a wet dog, and crept back furtively to his dangerous perch. (59)

Josh Green, however, an uneducated man of quick temper and fearless
action who had been employed as a dock-worker for Miller’s
father, is in this instance not subject to the same laws as Dr.
Miller. Stealing a ride and avoiding the gaze of the agents of
the law, he is not under the power of the law in the same way
as Miller, who was forced to surrender to the white conductor
his own personal dignity. And while Miller—who spots Josh
from his seat in the train—passes judgment on the dirty
hobo and concludes, “Blessed are the meek . . . for they
shall inherit the earth” (62), Josh was, however, being
more active and resistant to the oppressive powers than the doctor
who passively followed the rules that governed him. While Miller
calls Josh meek, it was this dusty, parched hobo who (in a place—the
railroad car—that was race-sensitive) was able to remain
unobserved and uncounted while the train was in motion. He was
able to create a space that allowed him to ride “in-between”
the law and, therefore, outside of history. It was a dangerous
space, one that caused Josh to exclaim, “I kind er ‘lowed
I was gone a dozen times, ez it wuz” (62), but it allowed
him to fulfill his goals of being unobserved and getting to the
place where he wanted to go. Due to his willingness to travel
in-between and, therefore, place himself outside of the law, Josh
was able to travel without money and with his personal dignity
by creating his own particular space on the train.

This is the power of subculture. John Fiske, in Television
Culture, states that “there is a power in resisting
power, there is a power in maintaining one’s social identity
in opposition to that proposed by the dominant ideology, there
is a power in asserting one’s own subcultural values against
the dominant ones” (19). It is the power of a subordinated
class of people, who, because of their (lack of) social position,
can be—for a time at least—outside the reach of the
law. The passenger can receive pleasure from the lack of effort
it takes to be a controlled subject in the railroad car because
“pleasure results from the production of meanings of the
world and the self that are felt to serve the interests of the
reader” (Fiske 19). Hobos, on the other hand, once they
define themselves as hobos, can receive pleasure from the freedom
that exists when poaching from the dominant culture. It is a fleeting
power that exists mainly when the train is in motion: when they
are in the act of stealing from the larger cultures, when they
are uncounted and outside history, when flesh and steel become
one, and spaces emerge from places. Only then does the subversive
power of the hobo manifest itself. It is a power that exerts itself
only in moments—“for what it wins it cannot keep”
(de Certeau 37)—and this power continually succumbs to the
hegemonic forces of the larger culture. Regardless, though, it
is a power that shows the cracks—spaces—that can be
created by a subordinated subculture.

Notes

1. Who exactly is a hobo? This is a question that
has been debated (both in academic circles and also around the
jungle campfires). The traditional definition is as follows: a
“hobo” is a migratory worker while the “tramp”
is a migratory non-worker and the “bum” is a non-migratory
non-worker. Obviously, though, these definitions bleed into each
other: As most hobo autobiographies attest, many who considered
themselves “hobos” at one time or another were forced
to beg on the road (so according to this strict definition, they
should then be considered “tramps”), and many times
they spent long stretches in cities (thus they could be considered
“bums”). In any event, everyone would agree that in
order to be a hobo, you must beat your way by train. There has
also been debate about whether or not there is a current hobo
population. While the scene has certainly changed since the first
‘bo hopped a train after the Golden Spike was knocked into
the ground at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869, men and women continue
to hop trains in the twenty-first century. For a well documented
and authoritative cultural history of the hobo, particularly in
terms of the racializing and gendering of the term, see Todd DePastino’s
Citizen Hobo. For a great discussion of the Hobo in terms
of his economic and cultural force in the Midwest from 1880-1930,
see Frank Higbie’s Indispensable Outcasts. See
also Eddy Joe Cotton’s Hobo and Jessica Hahn’s
Transient Ways for two perspectives on the present day
rail-riding community.click here
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2. This, of course, is a highly complex set of
negotiations and dealings involving class, race, and gender ideologies.
While Stephen Ambrose understands the building of the line and
the Big Four who were predominately involved in the building process
in a mostly positive light, see John Robinson’s book The
Octopus: A History of the Construction, Conspiracies, Extortions,
Robberies, and Villainous Acts of Subsidized Railroads for
a scathing look at how the Big Four ruined California. See also
Frank Norris’s The Octopus, the first novel in
his Epic of the Wheat trilogy, which is a fascinating and insightful
portrayal of the power that the railroad had over farmers.

3. For example, in a recent luxury car commercial,
a sleek, shiny car is placed in the middle of a loud, chaotic
construction sight. In the first frame, the windows to the car
are down, and the noise of the mechanical world is grating and
disturbing. But then, with the flick of a switch, the window of
the car goes up. Suddenly, the noise is gone, and there is only
the sound of low classical music on the car stereo. The noise
belonged to the uncivilized and unsafe construction world (space);
the sound belonged to the world of the (high-priced) civilized
and ordered car environment (place).

4. This does not mean that the hobo is necessarily
alone. While many hobos that I have interviewed enjoy traveling
alone, most do travel in pairs or in small groups. Jessica Hahn,
for example, who did travel and squat alone on occasion in the
1990s, usually did have a traveling companion when “catching
out” and traveling across the United States. This was done,
she explained, for both safety issues as well as camaraderie.
When hobos “disappear,” they rely on each other for
food, information, protection, and comfort. As Todd DePastino
astutely points out in Citizen Hobo, “If hoboing
was, to a degree, an individually chosen strategy for minimizing
wage dependency and insulating oneself against exploitation then
the success of this strategy hinged on informal networks that
made hoboing a collective enterprise as well” (69). If there
were not other individuals forming these loose webs of interaction
on the fringes of place, then the lone hobo would have an extremely
hard time surviving and making it down the line. The key, however,
is to keep these interactions out of sight from those who have
the power to regulate the bodies of these illegal train riders.

5. Ted Grossardt, in his article, “Harvest(ing)
Hoboes: The Production of Labor Organization through the Wheat
Harvest” explains the result of what happens when illegal
bodies have the ability to disappear: “When the activities
of a mobile group of people are no longer observable and thus
cannot be fully known, those people become potentially omnipresent
to the fixed observer. The observer suddenly faces the possibility
of being the observed” (285). Large groups of mostly single
men traveling unseen throughout the country produces much anxiety
in those who are rooted to their places. While passive bodies
are easy to control, active bodies who use their invisibility
for their own subcultural pleasure are quickly deemed dangerous
and laws (both vigilante and state sponsored) are produced and
enforced. Hobos, therefore, must continue to stay hidden from
those who wish to identify and regulate them.

6. Kenneth Allsop, who was one of the first to
write extensively about the hobo figure, writes of some of the
spaces: “He rode on the iron plate, yet another toehold
in the ‘guts,’ or lower berth, of a steam car. He
rode the ‘death woods,’ the couplings themselves—the
whipple trees or swingletrees—and the bumpers. He burrowed
in the coal of the engineer tender. He rode among the sheep and
cattle of the livestock cars. He rode in open gondolas piled with
granite. He rode on the top deck, the boardwalk along the center
of boxcars, and, if that was loaded in harvest time, he rode on
the garb irons and the ladder on the side. He rode ‘possum
belly on the tool or supply box under a car. He rode the toe path,
the narrow looking platform bolted on the walls of some rattlers.
He rode the footrail at the rear end of the tankers. He even rode,
if desperate to be on his way, under the headlight on the pilot
or cowcatcher, the grilled scoop that projected afore the front
wheels to clear obstructions from the line” (160).

7. Indeed, there is a distinct power to a moving
train unlike anything else. When I went to the National Hobo convention
in Britt, Iowa, I stayed in the jungle that was located a few
hundred yards from the railroad tracks. Sometime early in the
morning, I woke up to the sound of the train roaring past my tent.
In my confusion, I woke up startled, and because the sound was
so loud and powerful, I was convinced that the train was soon
to bear down upon me. Fumbling out of my tent, I crawled out on
my hands and knees and looked up at this machine roaring past
me—it was, to use an overused term, awesome. Its strength,
its muscle, its loudness, its beauty was magnificent. Gaining
my senses, I looked around and saw a few of the older hobos staring
at the machine as well. Some waved, some whooped, some just stared
but all, it seemed to me, were in wonderment of the train.